From the BBC:

The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at former US President George W Bush says he was tortured by senior government officials while in jail.

Well, who did it?

Shortly after his release from nine months in a Baghdad prison, Muntadar al-Zaidi demanded an apology - and said he would name the officials later.

Ah, those people. The dreaded “people to be named later.”

Naturally, the sock puppet believes the Iraqi “journalist”. Because, of course, ChimpyMcBushHitlerCheney tortured 20 billion people in his imperialist expansion of the American police state. Never mind that there isn’t any shred of evidence to back up the claim, nor does it appear that the sock puppet cares if any ever shows up. All the sock puppet cares about is feeding his hatred of the United States.

Read the whole thing at your own peril. If anything, it shows the sock puppet and the “journalist” share the same psychotic paranoia.

You know what kills me about people like the sock puppet? He can go through and make this claim about the war against the Islamist terrorists:

Aside from the grotesque immorality, criminality, loss of innocent life and the disappearance of untold billions upon billions of dollars,…

Yet, the death of nearly 40 million humans as a result of Roe v. Wade, Stalinesque in its proportion, is a “choice” and part of the “rule of law”. Amazing.

Newsweek has a nonsensical piece about the object of the outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) during Barack Obama’s rant on health “reform” last week, the new health bill allowing for illegal aliens to be covered by taxpayer-funded health insurance. Andrew Romano, the author, finally gets to the gist of his point a few paragraphs in:

The only problem? From a purely economic standpoint, insuring illegal immigrants makes a lot of sense—and not just for them, but for everyone.

For years, the leftists and statists complain how the United States needs to adhere to the rule of law. The hypocrisy is that when it comes to illegal aliens, they wish to ignore the rule of law, along with those Republicans who support cheap labor.

But as long as Mr. Romano wants to go there, I think a better proposal would be for the administration to either figure out how to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court, or for Congress to pass legislation that effectively does the same thing. Better yet, states could pass abortion legislation that ignores Roe, like many states and cities ignore federal immigration laws. See, the problem with Roe isn’t that overturning it would make abortion illegal, but that the power to determine abortion’s legality is returned rightly to the states, and hence the people.

Think about it; a healthy percentage of the babies killed under today’s “rule of law” travesty would remain alive as American citizens, protected by the rights guaranteed in the Constitution and the laws of this country. Any economic argument being made about how it would be beneficial to insure illegal aliens is even more applicable as it relates to the effects of overturning Roe. There would be a steadier replacement of the nation’s workforce; money wouldn’t be returned to any home country since the worker would already be working in their home country; and so on, and so forth. I could go further, but I think you get my point.

In any event, we know overturning Roe isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Politically, of course, this country has the most radical pro-abortion President and Congress ever, so we can’t expect any help from them. If we’re fortunate, there will be enough of an outcry to make sure the new health “reform” doesn’t include illegal aliens. But if any pro-abortion statist has the gall to say that including illegal aliens in any reform would be of great economic benefit to this country, which is in opposition to the rule of law, remind them that overturning or ignoring Roe would provide a greater economic benefit, as well as getting the government out of the business of the state-sanctioned murder of the most innocent of us. Then ask those pro-abortion statists if they are really interested in the rule of law in the first place.

The quoted part of this post’s title comes from DRJ at Patterico’s; the pictures say it all. There is a link to Cliff Thier at American Thinker who opines:

Mark today [ed. note: Sep. 12, 2009] as the date that the mainstream media put a gun in its mouth and pulled the trigger.

Then of course, there is Kanye West at last night’s MTV Video Music Awards. We all know that West is infamous for saying President George W. Bush hates black people, but Bob Owens has it right when he says “Kanye West Hates White People”, concluding:

I’d say it was likely a racist incident, but then, with West, that’s to be expected.

As far as I’m concerned, Kanye West is a racist. I would add misogynist as well.

It should be noted that Beyonce Knowles, the lady whose video was the object of West’s outrageous antics, was the epitome of class. Go check the CNN link above.

Consider this an open thread.

It seems Bill O’Reilly didn’t think the outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) during President Obama’s “speech” was warranted. Apparently, the reason for Wilson’s outburst, Obama’s constant lying throughout the rant “speech” culminating in the mendacity that the health “reform” the President wants wouldn’t include illegal aliens, wasn’t good enough for O’Reilly. One of the people O’Reilly had on to discuss this was Ann Coulter. Watch:

This is why I love Ann Coulter as she is entirely spot on.

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Eight years ago on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, my wife (we weren’t married then) and I were in Virginia Beach on vacation. We had gone to Virginia the previous Friday to go to the NASCAR race in Richmond, then spend a few extra days relaxing on the beach. On Sept. 10 we were sitting on the beach, and off in the distance we saw an aircraft carrier heading out to sea (I have no idea which carrier it was). I didn’t think anything of it other than the awe I felt in seeing such a magnificent ship on the ocean.

The next morning, 9/11, we awoke and turned on the TV in the hotel.

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You can tell our President is a leftist because he is ready, willing, and able to cajole and berate his fellow residents with agitprop and dishonest propaganda, but refuses to treat America’s enemies with anything but outright deference. Did you hear the lies that were coming fast and furious? I could swear his nose grew out all the way to Pelosi’s San Francisco office. Here’s a guy who in one sentence tells those opposing his health care mantra that he wants to talk and to hear their ideas, then in the next sentence say that the time for talk is over. How can anyone believe someone who makes it a point to speak out of his proktos (for my fellow Hellenes: ???????)? Forget any talk about possible tort reform as a “carrot” for conservatives to bite on; it’s simply not believable and, considering the tone of the “speech”, nothing but “smoke and mirrors”.

The best part of the day was Obama getting suckered by Sarah Palin. Again. It isn’t that the phrase “death panels” or the word “rationing” will be in any bill, or that it will say illegal immigrants won’t be covered, or the bill will have a specific provision outlawing federal funds to be used for abortions (House Democrats have already voted against the latter specific provision in the current iterations of the bill). Americans understand that the Orwellian etymology of legislative language indicates that what is not written, those items I mentioned, will actually be part of a bill that Obama will sign. Our President Pinocchio is still clinging to the notion that the American people are nothing more than the uneducated serfs who were personally beholden to him while he was a community organizer and a state senator. Considering all those people understand exactly what Palin was and is saying, calling out Obama and the statist Democrats for their attempted control of the American people, it is simply amazing that Obama would take the bait, thus making Palin even more relevant in the eyes of the American people.

One other point I want to make has to do with the audacity of Obama’s own mendacity. He spent much of the “speech” talking down members of the opposition party as if those people have any power to stop him or members of his own party in Congress from passing anything. But the American people already know that it is the divisions of Obama’s Democrat Party members that are killing any effort at getting what he wants passed. As has been shown in the polling data, the American people see through what Obama is pushing, seeing a vindictiveness that is the complete antithesis of Obama’s promise to bring people of all political persuasions together, something conservatives knew Obama would never do.

Of course, we’re talking about a President who is clearly out of his element in being able to run anything but a political campaign. Think about it; he cut his teeth as a community organizer, a job that requires only the talent of rhetoric, not in actually doing anything. It’s the same with his job as a professor and a state senator. As far as examples of how to run a government, all he has witnessed is the corruption of two Illinois governors and the fascism of the government of the City of Chicago. It almost seems as if Obama believes Congress is nothing more than another example of the rubber-stamp Democratic Chicago City Council that allows fellow Democratic Mayor Richard M. “Shortshanks”* Daley to run a hugely corrupt political operation without fear (so far). And for the last six years, all he has done is run for office. That’s it. Obama needs his ??????? handed to him to finally learn the lessons he needs. It needs to come soon in the form of the health “reform” bill going down in flames.

*Attributed to the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass.

Obese beta-male Michael Moore has a new film out called “Capitalism: A Love Story”. The end of the film, according to this piece by Reuters, states the following:

“Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil,” the two-hour movie concludes.

“You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.”

As you can see, Moore is targeting the film towards what would be his typical viewers…morons. Moore isn’t stupid; he knows that comparing capitalism and democracy is an apples-and-oranges exercise. But he relies on an audience of the usual dimwits and demagogues, clueless Hollywood liberals, the Marxist university elite, leftist lawyers, and statist Democrats, in order to make a buck. And that is the ultimate hypocrisy; Moore is as much a capitalist as those he rails against. What he sells, however, is nothing productive and only promotes his hatred of America and the American people.

I don’t believe Moore, whose obesity should be considered a threat to the American health care system by those statists who want a single-payer health system, has done a movie about the evils of communism, which by design requires the vast percentage of a nation’s population to be reduced to living in poverty in the name of economic equality…well, except for the mass-murdering criminals that run those systems. Of course, Moore’s last film, “Sicko”, extolled the “virtues” of the Cuban health care system under the murderous and tyrannical regime of the Castros, despite the fact that the rotting Fidel needed a surgeon from Spain to keep himself alive after his own Cuban doctors botched a surgery that almost killed him (too bad!). Don’t expect Moore to change his modus operandi when it comes to his own hypocritical capitalism.

As noted by CNN (where I first saw the story) and here at RedState, self-avowed Communist and Obama “Green Czar” Van Jones resigned from his position around midnight. As is obvious, it was done during a holiday weekend and while the President was on “vacation” so that Obama didn’t have to worry about having to answer pesky questions from the media, provided they bother asking.

The RedState post links to a great piece by Byron York that clearly demonstrates everything that is wrong with the lion’s share of the media today, their refusal to cover President Obama in any kind of objective manner. Other than the conservative blogosphere, talk radio, and Fox News, the media was going to ignore this appointment, much like every other appointment and policy decision made by the administration. While this isn’t news to conservatives, the awakening American people are slowly coming to grips with a mainstream media that is acting more like a hired PR firm for the Obama administration and the Democratic Party than an objective purveyor of the news.

This is a pretty good victory for conservatives and all Americans, but it isn’t one with which to rest laurels upon. Pressure on the administration and the Democratic Congressional “leadership” needs to be maintained and increased to find out if they ever plan on dealing with the short-term economic issues or continuing to distract the American people with policies that will both add to Americans’ dependence on the government and every American’s financial burden in order to pay off a statist-created and irresponsible government debt, regardless of political party. This government has to be told that if they don’t do what is fiscally proper, then we will add a few more to the unemployment rolls in 2010.

I do find it ironic that Jones, in a manner that befits his status as a complete hypocrite, had this to say:

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones said in the statement. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

No sir, we are not using lies and distortions, but your own words and actions. However, I hope he feels better after getting that off his chest. Now Mr. Jones, go away.

I’ve been following along with the saga of President Obama’s “Green Czar”, someone who can’t define what a “green” job is (nor can anyone else), the self-avowed Communist Van Jones. The push to get him removed has done much to further put on display Obama’s past and present associations with outright radicals, and showing Obama to be as unserious as any of these people who want to be considered an advocate of American values or Americans themselves. These statists, Obama and Jones included, want to define what it is to be an American, despite the contradiction of those definitions as they relate to the real history of the United States.

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit has been the leader of getting the word out about Jones’ Trutherism, along with Jones’ feeble attempts at denial. Various leftists have tried to come to the defense of Jones by saying they, like Jones, never really endorsed the notion of a Bush administration conspiracy to perpetrate the terrorist attacks on 9/11, but Ace has evidence, along with Hoft’s evidence about Jones, showing that these statements are egregious lies. Jones and the others did endorse the wacky Truther conspiracy theory that Bush caused 9/11, calling for Congressional investigations to prove it. How President Obama could figure that this information wouldn’t come out is unbelievable. But I imagine it’s a sign of the massive arrogance of the man after two and a half years of having a media more intent on prostituting themselves to have their legs thrilled than in an actual investigation of Obama’s fitness to be the President of the United States.

But this isn’t just a simple, broad recap of the Van Jones story, but a warning as to how this will next play out. While I would suppose that the Obama administration itself might have learned a lesson from the Henry Gates fiasco (although that remains to be seen), Democrats and their leftist marionettes, possibly even Jones himself, will play the race card. Why? Because that is what they do. Even if Obama does give Jones the boot, it will not stop calls from various people in power saying that race had everything to do with Jones’ removal. Obama used the race card during the Presidential campaign and with the Gates’ incident, Democrats used the race card to get Roland Burris installed as a U.S. Senator of my former state, Democrats used the race card to get Eric Holder installed as Attorney General (along with others in the Justice Department and other Cabinet positions) and Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court, and statists have used the race card when trying to criticize the critics of every disastrous Obama policy that has come down, from SCHIP, to Porkulus, through cap-and-tax and health “reform”. Have no doubt that the same race-baiters will double-down on their efforts to cast this sorry Jones episode into some form of fabricated racism on the part of Jones’ critics, and critics of President Obama’s incompetent handling of the government and his horrible policies. Be ready for it.

I’m not so worried about the use of the word “czars” to define administration jobs not confirmed by the Senate that are being hugely expanded by this President, and I don’t believe worrying about the word itself has any merit (I would have a problem with the word “Fuehrer” if it had been used). After all, look how the word “war” has been expanded by Presidents of both parties to define policies that aren’t about warfare; e.g., the “War on Drugs”, the “War on Poverty”, etc. The use of the word “czar” isn’t one of those things conservatives should really worry about. The word “czar” (or “tsar”) and the German word “kaiser” are derived from the Latin word “caesar”, with its obvious reference to Gaius Julius Caesar and the title used by Roman emperors. But the origins of the word “caesar” had to do with how the Romans defined different branches of the same family or clan, in this case the Julian family that Caesar belonged to; other branches of the Julian family would use a different cognomen (third or descriptive name) to distinguish themselves from the Julius Caesars. Although not entirely known, some scholars render a loose translation into English of the Latin word “caesar” as the word “curly” (despite the fact that Gaius Julius Caesar the dictator was balding; apparently, his ancestors may have been known for having full heads of curly hair). Battling over the use of the word “czar” isn’t, to me, worth the effort. Alternatively, use the old Latin form of the word in an imaginative manner to describe these individuals, after all, similar to Gaius Julius Caesar, Van Jones is notable for a lack of hair, although his style is self-inflicted as opposed to what Caesar inherited through his ancestors’ gene pool.

What is worth the effort is battling against Obama’s attempt to establish the Presidency as a statist, authoritarian branch of the federal government, hugely expanding an already massive bureaucracy ahead of what would be eventual Congressional authorization for new Cabinet positions and departments. Other Presidents had done the same thing, but not on a scale as this administration. Just as with Porkulus and health “reform”, Obama is trying to work fast to implement a leftist fantasy wish list of government and policy before the American people can figure out what is going on. Fortunately for America, the last month of protests show that the American people as a whole aren’t bent on turning over their lives to the government. Continuing the pressure by highlighting the Van Jones appointment will help further the American cause.

But count on the statists coming back with the race card. They are desperate, and they always use it when desperate (and, sometimes when not). Be ready for it.

I hate, vehemently, when anyone attempts to rewrite history. It’s bad enough when the left does it; but when done by conservatives, it drives me nuts.

Pat Buchanan wrote a book recently that seemed to say that it was Winston Churchill who pushed Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler into expanding World War II and, in effect, driving Hitler to commit The Holocaust. I lost all of my respect for Buchanan after that.

So what does he do? He writes an opinion piece that adds to the blame the intransigence of the Polish government of 1939 over the mostly German free city of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk; Buchanan explains how Danzig was created a free city, a semi-autonomous city-state, after WWI). At the time, Germany was in two parts: the main territory of Germany was roughly where it is today, but the territory of East Prussia was separated from the country by what was known as the Polish Corridor; Danzig, a port city on the Baltic Sea, was in between East Prussia and Germany proper. Buchanan mentions that Germany had hinted at offering Poland part of the territory of Slovakia that Germany had somewhat allowed to break away from Czechoslovakia after the 1938 Munich agreement in exchange for returning Danzig to German control. According to Buchanan, the Polish government supposedly refused because they had a guarantee that Britain would defend Poland militarily if there were any German incursions (Britain was still under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who wasn’t going to be hoodwinked again after his failure at Munich the year before). But that doesn’t explain it completely.

Buchanan does at least acknowledge that Hitler had completely violated the agreement at Munich as a reason why Britain would ally itself with Poland. But after that, Buchanan’s reasoning falls apart. He opines that if Hitler were bent on conquest, which is what was feared by Britain, why did Hitler build the defensive Siegfried Line on its border with France, why didn’t Germany wait until it had a navy with a size comparable to that of Britain, why didn’t Germany build strategic bombers, why did Hitler allow British forces to escape from Dunkirk, and why did Hitler supposedly put through peace overtures towards Britain? Buchanan’s answer is utterly ridiculous:

Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.

I wonder if Buchanan ever read Mein Kampf. It is true that Hitler never set out to conquer Britain, at least not initially. Hitler’s target was always the Soviet Union, something you almost never hear Buchanan mention. And to get to the Soviet Union, he needed Poland gone, France and Britain out of the war, and for the Balkan countries, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia to remain his allies to protect his southern flank.

Buchanan completely avoids the strategic reasoning behind Hitler’s moves prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite what Buchanan might think, there wasn’t any way that Hitler wanted Poland as an ally or even neutral. He needed to get his army in a position to be closer to the Soviet Union before launching any invasion. He couldn’t have tried to get an alliance with Poland because that would have antagonized Stalin into action before Hitler was ready to tackle the Red Army. And he couldn’t first invade Poland without figuring out how to sucker Stalin into some deal that would keep the massive Soviet military at bay before Hitler was ready to take it on. But before that could happen, he needed Britain and France out of the war. Yet, He couldn’t attack those two first without antagonizing Poland into possibly attacking from the east. After three years of Nazi antagonism towards Britain and France, with the incursion into the Rhineland in 1936 and the takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938-9, Hitler rightly figured that even with British and French assurances of military help for Poland, it would take too long for those two countries to act decisively in turning Germany’s armies from being on the offensive in the east to being on the defensive in the west. Plus, Hitler did get his non-aggression pact with Stalin about a week before the invasion, so the Soviets would be off his back.

The bottom line is that Germany’s complaints about Danzig were an excuse, nothing more, nothing less. Had Poland capitulated over Danzig, Hitler would have kept coming back for more until he figured out some kind of pretext with which to invade. That was the key. Poland had to go away.

Buchanan doesn’t seem to consider this as a possibility, which is amazing for such a learned man. What’s worse is that the questions that Buchanan asks about why Hitler didn’t do this or didn’t do that avoids him having to give the obvious answer. Hitler was a brilliant political strategist in that he rightly guessed how the political leaders of the other nations would react over his actions from 1936 through 1939. However, the obvious answer to Buchanan’s questions was that Hitler sucked as a military planner and strategist. The brilliance of the Nazi advance into western Europe was due as much to the prowess of the German Wehrmacht as it was due to British reliance on the political ineptitude of the French government and the military ineptitude of the French general staff (Britain needed a formidable military ally in France during those early days, and it wasn’t there). In addition, Stalin’s badly fought war with Finland, who was an erstwhile ally of Germany, and which led to frequent complaints from Stalin to Hitler for the 19 months between the beginning of that war until June 22, 1941 (the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion into the Soviet Union), convinced Hitler that the Soviet Union was ripe to fall. Yet, Hitler didn’t do any of the things Buchanan cites in his questions. And that was because of two things: Hitler never counted on Churchill keeping Britain in the war; and, Hitler expected a quick victory over the Soviet Union, figuring his tanks and armies would be rolling into Moscow long before the dreaded Russian winter would set in, and was not ready to fight a protracted war of attrition with the Soviets. What was worse for Germany (and good for the rest of us), Hitler never bothered putting the economy on a wartime footing, as every one of his enemies did; Hitler had the factories working 8-hour days all the way into 1943, even after his disastrous setbacks at Moscow, El Alamein, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Sicily, while the Allied factories were working 24-hours a day. Plus, the weapons systems the Germans were building were complicated to build in great numbers, especially its tanks, whereas the Americans and the Soviets were able to build simpler tanks and quality airplanes in huge numbers. Hitler’s strategic military plan wasn’t even all that original; it was a modified rehash of Germany’s pre-World War I Schlieffen plan, Germany’s attempt to knock out France and Britain before attacking Russia. The execution of the plan in World War II exceeded what had been attempted a quarter-century earlier, but it wasn’t completely successful since Britain remained a belligerent.

When all is said and done, Hitler was intent to start a war of conquest, something Mein Kampf makes blatantly clear. But because Hitler had no concept of how to completely mobilize Germany to fight the kind of war he wanted waged, because he was mostly surrounded by sycophants who were too cowardly to offer advice that Hitler needed for victory (plus, those sycophants were mostly surrounded by their own sycophants), and because he would ignore the advice some smarter sycophants were willing to offer, the only conclusion to draw is that Hitler was a lousy, and completely inflexible, military leader, a fact that Buchanan never entertains.

Pat Buchanan is a very smart guy, but his ultra-isolationist orthodoxy seems to have clouded his judgment about who is to blame for World War II. I understand that conservatives such as Buchanan and Ron Paul take to heart George Washington’s warning about meddling into European affairs (and by extension, world affairs); but, this isn’t the 1790’s where commercial trade and the exchange of ideas took days and months to get started, let alone completed. It’s the same with the mobility that was in place 200 years ago as compared to what can be employed in modern-day warfare. Buchanan is rightly concerned that much of U.S. trade policy is damaging to this country’s ability to produce. But that’s no excuse for trying to revise the real history of how World War II came about, especially when trying to lay blame with the start of the war, and ultimately, the Holocaust, on anyone but Adolf Hitler.

There are many more important things for conservatives to discuss, especially as President Obama and Congressional Democrat “leaders” (and their moonbat supporters) seek to implement the authoritarian government, one that is overreaching on the American people and is weak in foreign policy, they accused President Bush of seeking. It doesn’t help when some conservatives engage in complete nonsense that have nothing to do with stopping what the federal government wants to do to us. Views like Buchanan’s must be quickly debunked in order to proceed with the work that needs to be done. This is my attempt to do just that.

Remember this video?

This was shot when then-Gov. Sarah Palin went to Kuwait in 2007 to visit her state’s National Guard troops.

The AP has a story today about Palin. Here’s the opening paragraph [emphasis mine]:

Former U.S. vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, once questioned about her lack of foreign policy experience, will make her first trip to Asia in September.

The last I checked, Kuwait is in…Asia.

It is obvious that to be a “journalist” in the Democratic mainstream media doesn’t require a basic education, especially in geography and history.

(Hat tip: Lucianne.com - fixed)

I had wondered why Barack Obama appointed Leon Panetta to be the new Director of the CIA. I’m now thinking that Panetta was put into the position to help Obama ferret out information from the agency in order to get AG Eric Holder to file trumped-up charges against high-ranking members of the Bush administration, including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for the supposed “misdeeds” of trying to prevent another terrorist attack following 9/11. Panetta, to his credit, has fought tooth-and-nail against the President, Holder, and the serial liar invested as the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, to protect his charges in what Panetta and the four previous CIA Directors have said was a good faith effort to protect the people of this country. Although Panetta slipped up a bit when he tried to push the idea that the CIA had come up with a program to assassinate Al Qaeda leaders without prior notification of Congress, which ended up being nothing more than a Powerpoint presentation that was never implemented (hence the lack of a need to notify Congress), Panetta has been doing his best to hold his own.

It may be all for naught if, as is stated in this great Wall Street Journal piece by Kimberly Strassel, Obama is setting Panetta up to be the fall guy with Holder’s addition of a prosecutor to look further into the allegations of CIA “torture”. It is all quite unsettling in that Obama has publicly stated that he wants to move towards the future and not relive the past. But with the approval of his policies and his handling of the Presidency ever plummeting, even from his leftwing base, along with what I believe is a secret desire of Obama to really stick it to Bush and Cheney, the President seems to believe this limited overture to allow Holder to further undermine Panetta and the CIA will help Obama at least get back the support of the worst of the moonbats. These would be the so-called “civil libertarians” who say the CIA’s treatment of Al Qaeda monsters Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydeh, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was tantamount to torture, despite the fact that the recent release of a 2004 CIA Inspector General report pretty much showed that the enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) weren’t, generally speaking, torture (there were some abuses, but those have been dealt with), that American lives were saved, and that Congress was fully informed of the EITs, thus proving that Pelosi’s statements from earlier this year indicating that the CIA lies all the time was actually a lie by Pelosi.

Most egregious is that Obama’s and Holder’s war against the CIA is going on while the nation is still at war, and the CIA is supposed to be front and center in gathering the required intelligence to defeat Al Qaeda. Despite Obama’s willingness to keep most of what the Bush administration had put in to fight this war, Obama is slowly working on dismantling those items to further distance himself from his predecessor. It seems to the American people that they don’t know if the government still believes the U.S. is at war, and it is Obama who is leading the effort to confuse us. This lopsided battle the administration is engaged in with the CIA and Panetta is part of that.

I am reminded of Thomas Beckett (hence the title of this post), the Archbishop of Canterbury installed by English King Henry II over 800 years ago. Henry, by all accounts and despite his flaws, was a great king. But, he really fouled up with Beckett. For those who don’t know, Beckett was a cleric and longtime friend of Henry. As was the case with most European kings, Henry was involved in a protracted struggle with the Catholic church over who, the king or the Pope, has authority over the local churches and churchmen. Henry appointed Beckett in the top position of religious authority in England, with Henry thinking he could get his way with his best bud in that job. Like Panetta with Obama, Beckett would have none of it, defending the rights of the church and his churchmen against the encroachments of the king. Things got so bad that Henry, in the presence of four knights, wondered aloud “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?” (the popular but mistaken quote attributed to Henry was “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”). These knights took matters into their own hands and hacked Beckett to death while the Archbishop was at evening prayers (vespers). Needless to say, the Church didn’t take kindly to having one of their leading people murdered and eventually, Henry served his penance by being publicly flogged by the churchmen he had so demonized. He also had to give up his fight with the Church over control of the English churches.

Being the brilliant politician and leader that Henry was, he knew when he lost, and was publicly contrite about it. Now, I doubt that Obama has it in mind that someone should murder Panetta, and I don’t think Obama deserves to be punished as Henry was. But Obama hasn’t yet figured out how to admit he is wrong here, even privately. His ideology and complete lack of governing experience motivate Obama in his actions instead of prudence and leadership. That works fine when campaigning to win the office of the Presidency, which Obama did by campaigning against President Bush instead of John McCain. But Obama is now the President, not George W. Bush. It’s time Obama figured that out.

Ed Morrissey has written some good stuff about last year’s Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in response to a problem created in large part by Mattel’s recall of 2 million toys, made mostly overseas, after it was discovered that they contained large amounts of lead. Unfortunately, the law allows the Consumer Product Safety Commission to require resellers at thrift shops and garage sales to subject what they sell to tests conducted by independent laboratories, at the resellers’ expense, such that the net effect will be to drive the small resale businesses out and those holding garage sales to throw away perfectly good stuff to avoid government retribution.

Morrissey has a post linking to an AP story about one company that recently and quietly got a waiver from having their products tested at these independent labs allowing the company’s own labs do the testing. The company? Mattel.

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Bud Fox: I guess you’re a decorator?

Darien Taylor: You got it. A great spender of other people’s money.

To me, there exists nowhere a more apt description of the legacy of modern-day, left-wing “liberalism”, statism (H/T: Mark Levin), as preached by the late Ted Kennedy than in this quote from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Whether he was personally generous is something I don’t know, although we know he was born into massive wealth, and lived and died as a massively wealthy man. Yet as the “Liberal Lion” of the Senate, Kennedy was one of the long-time political leaders of those whose job seemed to be a steroids-enhanced version of Stone’s fictional decorator.

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This is stunning:

The Justice Department recently questioned military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay about whether photographs of CIA personnel, including covert officers, were unlawfully provided to detainees charged with organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

How much screaming from the left did we hear about the “treason” committed by members of the Bush administration after covert agent Valerie Plame was outed in 2003 (before anyone says it, she was covert; but, nobody violated the IIPA since nobody outside of the CIA knew it in order to be charged with violating it)? It was endless and still going on today now and again. But will we hear anything from these same clowns about this? Don’t hold your breath. In fact, good luck getting them to mention that covert agents may have been involved.

And what about the ACLU and the defense attorneys? Stop the ACLU has the perfect sentence for this:

In the world of ACLU lawyers jihadas have privacy rights to defend, yet American citizens fighting for America don’t.

Ed Morrissey sees this as a justification for believing captured terrorists shouldn’t be treated like common criminals in civil court (I agree). Jim Hoft mentions that lefty statists will call fellow Americans who disagree with them over health care “teabaggers” and “mobsters”, but bend over backwards to help terrorists. Sister Toldjah, Michelle Malkin, and GayPatriot all weigh in as well.

Consider this an open thread.

As was expected, the brown-nosing, Obama-shilling, leg-thrilling, Democratic mainstream media didn’t say boo about MSNBC’s outrageous “Morning Meeting” segment that I wrote about yesterday, where MSNBC seems to want to start a race war in the so-called post-racial America run by Barack Obama. MSNBC themselves issued a response that further shows the network to be prostitutes of the Obama propaganda machine (as reported by the Washington Post a couple of months ago, GE received low interest “loans”, ie., a bailout, from the Obama administration).

The POLITICO seems to have been the only media outlet to have reported on this, and they left it to Michael Calderone to write it up. He did receive a response from MSNBC about the segment in question:

An MSNBC spokesperson responded to POLITICO: “Contessa was speaking generally and not about that specific person with the automatic weapon.”

That’s it. That is all of it.

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Under normal circumstances, I could use the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi as a precursor to slam President Obama. Looking at the situation, however, I agree with what he said, and would like to give the reasons why. I’m not going soft on this administration, but every President will say things I agree with once in a great while.

A couple of days ago, the Obama administration and many in Congress insisted that the only man convicted of the terrorist act of downing Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland and murdering nearly 300 people (189 of those were Americans) should not be released from prison, despite the fact that the murderer is supposedly dying of prostate cancer. The Scottish judge who had jurisdiction over this case had al-Megrahi released anyway and he was sent to live out the remainder of his days in Libya. Obama followed up by saying the release was a mistake and said that the government had contacted Libyan authorities to further insist that the terrorist remain under house arrest until he dies. Unlike most every other aspect of Obama’s ridiculous foreign policy, I agree with him that Scotland’s release of this terrorist was a mistake, and that I agree with him saying so publicly.

Could Obama have done more? I seriously doubt it. It was the Bush administration that re-established ties with Libya. Depending on what the Qaddafi regime does with al-Megrahi, I don’t see Obama calling for sanctions against the country; and Obama isn’t going to call for sanctions against Scotland or the U.K. As much as we’d like to think so, the United States doesn’t have omnipotent influence over every decision of every other country. Even under the Bush administration, the U.S. government couldn’t persuade Pakistan to do anything to A.Q. Khan, nor force Middle Eastern countries to permanently imprison terrorists released from Gitmo over the last few years. In the case of the al-Megrahi release, Obama’s hands were and are tied. He did the only thing he could do. And I agree with what he said.

With that, it is time to return to the evisceration of Obama’s policies and competency.

Katrina Browne is a filmmaker. Apparently, her ancestors were Yankee slave traders (from Rhode Island). Because of her liberal guilt, America must continue its never-ending apologies to African-Americans for slavery. One of the things that is amazing to me about those on the left is that they will mention the Civil War in passing when discussing slavery, then move on to Jim Crow. Browne does that here:

Slavery benefited immigrant families, even after the Civil War. Millions of Europeans flocked to the “land of opportunity” for jobs in a booming economy built largely on unpaid labor. Immigrants struggled when they arrived but then found routes to prosperity closed to African-Americans for a century after slavery as a result of official and unofficial segregation.

I have no doubt that this woman has no idea of the amount of blood spilled during the Civil War (about 320,000 white Union soldiers were killed, and about 40,000 black Union soldiers were killed). It isn’t enough. And as is typical with leftists in everything they politicize, it is never enough.

It seems to me that people like this want the whole country to enable them so that they can continue to share in their guilt. I ain’t buying it. My ancestors didn’t come to this country until the early parts of the 20th Century, long after slavery was abolished, so this moonbat can forget me helping her to assuage her own self-imposed guilt.

Get over it.

By the way, she donated to Obama’s campaign. Why am I not surprised.

(Hat Tip: Lucianne.com)

Many Christians are well aware of the concept of original sin. Apparently, those who practice the religion of Anthropogenic Climatism have decided to hijack that concept and redefine “original sin”:

Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth’s climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia’s Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere. That possibly caused the Earth to warm up and forever changed the climate.

Have you finished laughing yet?

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I sent the following confession of my sin to flag@whitehouse.gov.

To whom it may concern:

I am writing you to flag myself as one who has disagreed with President Obama’s outlines for health “reform” (I’m not sure if it’s considered health care reform or health insurance reform; of course, I didn’t go to Harvard and may not understand all the “nuance” from this administration) and aligned myself with those spreading what the administration calls “misinformation” about the proposals being bandied about. Allow me to express my contrition.

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